Where Did It All Go Right?

by Andrew Collins

  It also gave rise in me a genuine mania for music: slavishly following the Top 40, spending hours fingering the racks in record shops, forming friendships over the arm of a hot record player, and eventually going to gigs. I continued buying the NME without fail every week until I was well into my thirties. Through early-Eighties NME writers like Paul Morley, Barney Hoskyns and Ian Penman and later Stuart Cosgrove and Sean O’Hagan I became interested in philosophy and hip literature, and eventually leftwing politics. I still buy records avidly – albums not singles, CDs not vinyl, but I pore over the sleeves just like I used to. And I still own every record I ever bought and the inaugural singles case Dad bought me over 20 years ago.

  My blinkered devotion to punk, or what were already its dying embers, was broadened by necessity and experimentation. I bought into the multiracial storm of 2-Tone, became intoxicated by the early 12-inches (mainly Sparks and disco) and subsequently fell for New Romanticism. In 1981 I grew my spiky hair out into a lavish fringe and replaced the maroon V-neck with those fancy cavalry-style shirts that did up over one side, risking calls of ‘poof’. Music and fashion now dictated my life. A healthy state of affairs for the normal teenager.

  The punk ethic (‘This is a chord. This is another. This is a third. Now form a band’) even worked its clarion magic. I formed a modest two-piece band in January 1980 with Pete Sawtell called D.D.T. He had a guitar, an amp and the required three chords; I had nothing but sufficient bluster to sing The Undertones’ ‘You’ve Got My Number’ into a tape recorder. Pete taught me how to tap out the rhythm with a tyre lever on a singles case and a drummer was born. We wrote a song called ‘Past Tense’ (Pete stole the riff from ‘ESP’ by the Buzzcocks, and I can even remember the first line: ‘It’s no use running down Memory Lane’), and by recruiting Craig McKenna on bass (he couldn’t play one, but then neither could The Clash’s Paul Simonon to start with) we were able to turn our bedroom daydream into reality.

  I tutored myself long and hard in the art of drumming, using two rulers on a vinyl-covered stool, and in August 1980 talked Mum and Dad into letting me buy a second-hand snare drum and cymbal. After this the three of us took that most important step for any band: we got Dave Griffiths to take photographs of us. We began 1981 as The Brightest View, named after a 999 album track. We lacked only a vocalist.

  Dave had a crack but it didn’t work out. In February, my parents went beyond the call of duty and bought me a full Premier drum kit for £200 second-hand. What were they thinking of? That it would keep me off the streets? We built up a set list (Pete was the musical brains of the operation), and enjoyed sporadic ‘recording sessions’ in the extension at Winsford Way until, by letting Hayley’s brother Vaughan replace Dave on vocals and rhythm guitar, we gained access to a mobile classroom at the NSB (where Vaughan went). Nothing much happened beyond a few enthusiastic C60s, but Mum and Dad allowed me to keep my drums up permanently in my new bedroom and I improved my rolls and paradiddles daily. (In May, I had moved in to the new extension-on-top-of-the-extension – independence from Simon and bunk beds at last, and not a moment too soon, hormonally speaking.)

  In October Vaughan was out (he sold his guitar), and Jo Gosling the armband girl was in. First practice: Craig’s kitchen. (The band wasn’t just keeping us off the mean streets of Northampton, it was keeping us in the house – a small price to pay for the humbly amplified, Jam and 999 influenced racket various parents and neighbours had to put up with.)

  A flight of fancy had, in two years, turned into a way of life, an expensive hobby. (I had promised to pay Dad back the £200 in instalments from my first – and last – Saturday job at Sainsbury’s, even though I was only on £1.21 an hour, £14 a week. I fear I still owe him about £100.) The Brightest View had suddenly become a vehicle for four teenage rock’n’roll fantasies. In 1982, our big year, we changed our name to Late Heroes, then Absolute Heroes,5 and made our live debut on 20 March at the Marina Bar in Billing (a private party, of course, but the smell of the greasepaint was the same and the blokes who hired us the PA got us our second gig supporting the Antibodies at the Black Lion pub a week later).

  All this – the band, the hair, the drum kit, the Saturday job, the way of life – can be traced back to the day I saw ‘Something Else’ on Top of the Pops, and Jimmy Savile, the man who had ignored my letter about meeting Giles all those years ago, warned the nation not to ride a motorbike without proper protection. I thought, ‘Fuck you, hippy!’ and went out and got myself a decent haircut. If I’d had a motorbike I would have ridden it without a helmet all the way to Pete’s house in Weston Way.

  War was declared – but not the scary kind – and battle came down, all the way to Billing. I was a boy in 1979. Three years later I was a man. Alright, an older boy, but I was wearing clothes I’d chosen, not Mum, and Carol cut my hair how I wanted it, not Mum. I had passed through the white-hot crucible of punk and I had emerged stronger, harder, more individual, more motivated and more rhythmic. I was now … Andy.

  Andrew – he dead. Ooh dear.

  1 ‘Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?’ One of the great lines of the twentieth century, though it rarely makes those dictionaries of quotations.

  2 Northampton is ‘not a big college town’ (to use the Spinal Tap vernacular). These days of course, the Roadmender has established itself as an itinerary staple for medium-sized bands, but it wasn’t even a venue when I lived there, just a pub in a very bad location. The first ever gig I attended was U2 and Altered Images in the refectory at Nene College of Further Education (Park Campus) on 20 January 1981, a rare opportunity to catch a national tour in town (they had just released Boy and I’m proud to say I caught them when you could get close enough to smell Bono). In February, again thanks to the NCFE (perhaps they had an unusually hip ents sec that year), I saw Classix Nouveaux and Theatre Of Hate at the County Ground, and in 1982 I caught local legends Bauhaus at Lings Forum. But my most significant big gigs involved driving or being driven to other towns: The Cure, Siouxsie & The Banshees, Echo & The Bunnymen. How I envy people who grew up in proper places like Leicester and Nottingham.

  3 I can still play it. D, D, D, E, D, F, G, A, A, B, A, B, C, D, A, A, G, A, G, F, D … I think. Try it. If it sounds like ‘The Floral Dance’, I am Evelyn Glennie and I claim my £5.

  4 Dad’s finest hour was asking for a 12-inch (‘The Bunker’) by The Bollock Brothers.

  5 In combined tribute to The Jam’s ‘Absolute Beginners’ and David Bowie’s “Heroes”. You see where we were coming from?

  thirteen

  Ma Favourite Programme

  Guilt is important. Otherwise you’re capable of terrible things.

  Woody Allen, Broadway Danny Rose (1984)

  I HAVE SPENT a lot of my adult life wracked with guilt, and I must say it has stopped me doing a lot of terrible things. Some of this guilt is prospective – if I do x I know I’ll feel guilty about it so I won’t do it (drop litter, park the car thoughtlessly, send a nasty email); some of it is long-distance retrospective – I wish I hadn’t done x in the past (pulled the wings off daddy-longlegs, thrown those curtains out that belonged to our landlady, stupidly introduced Julie as ‘the wife’ once); and the remainder is global – if I do x, it will contribute to the ills of an already knackered planet (use aluminium-based deodorant, drive round the corner, ignore beggars). That’s a lot of guilt for someone with no religious leanings. But I would rather feel guilty than not give a monkey’s.

  It is, of course, only the retrospective guilt that need concern us here. The really pointless kind. So I wilfully tortured insects – what normal child doesn’t? At least it didn’t extend to vertebrates, birds, pets. We could even file it under healthy curiosity, methodically plucking the legs off crane flies to see what would happen. It’s no worse than industrialised vivisection and that’s organised, supported and carried out by adults. Life’s too short – albeit not as short as a crane fly’s – to feel guilty about something cruel you did as a child. Of cours
e we all look back and wish we were better human beings when we were in wellies, but the mind takes time to form. I grew up with a lot of silly attitudes that have been refined and even turned on their head by the years.

  I sometimes think we are all born fascists and murderers, it’s just that some of us thankfully grow out of it. For me, this is the true meaning of civilisation. For what is right-wing thinking if not straightforward selfishness? (Look at the way parenthood disfigures many a good liberal, turning them back into a blinkered Tory reactionary.) Adult xenophobia and racism are merely extensions of the childhood suspicion meted out to a kid who wears glasses. Steven Ambrose (not his real name) was the New Kid at middle school – he had the audacity to turn up mid-term in 1977, wearing thick National Health specs and using a pronounced limp in a built-up area.

  Here is the welcome I extended to him, from my diary:

  Monday:

  We had a new boy in our class – Steven Ambrose. Methinks he is a twat.

  Tuesday:

  This new kid is a twat.

  Wednesday:

  This new kid is really loon.

  Thursday:

  Made jam tarts in cookery. Well you ought to have seen the new kid’s efforts. Ha ha.

  Ha ha. These words are accompanied by malicious cartoons of the New Kid with his tongue sticking out and hands fixed in classic ‘spaz’ mode. Flies buzz around my little drawing of his rubbish jam tarts. I’m sure Steven was alright really. Slightly eccentric. Gangly. He did nothing to harm me or affect my holidays and yet I seem to have been boiling over with hostility towards him. I was, like most kids, wary of that which I did not know. I was inadvertently displaying the classic fear of difference that lay at the heart of the Third Reich. I had rejected Steven Ambrose for no better reason than not really knowing him. And for his glasses. Next stop, a subscription to Eugenics Week and the annexation of the Sudetenland. Ha ha.

  Alright, a bit extreme, but I kind of wish I’d seen the bigger picture. My worldview during those delicate teenage years left a lot to be desired. My worldview in fact had very little ‘world’ in it. Let’s have a look through the inverted telescope of small-mindedness once again. There’s a bit of all of us in here.

  * * *

  Northampton was a strictly white bread town in the Seventies. The estates of Abington Vale presented a sea of pale faces, likewise the three schools I went to. The Leslies lived over the back, as we have established, and their daughter Angela was the only black kid in my class at primary school. There was also Alana, an Asian girl (I can’t be any more specific than that), Kim Gupta, Wyn Murphy (Welsh) and that’s it for the lively ethnic gumbo.

  What I will say is that race was never an issue. I was born in the year of the first Race Relations Act and they would have been proud of me. Angela and Alana (and later Nina and Maria and Ketna), they were just girls in my school. There was a black kid in my Saturday morning art class, Louis – again, no issue. He was just Louis. Bearing in mind the Caucasian bias of the landscape, I grew up commendably colour-blind. I suppose I could’ve been more interested in the fact that Kim’s parents had presumably settled here in the Fifties or Sixties – I might have learned something – but instead I just regarded him as another kid to play with.

  Not being a big industrial centre – outside of shoes and lifts – immigration to Northampton was anything but large scale (Birmingham, Wolverhampton and Coventry were more needy of extra hands). Anyway, we had all those overspill cockneys to house first. But none of this made me suspicious of non-whites. I was obviously more offended by people with glasses or a funny walk.

  Casual racism came in the form of lazy talk: woggies, blackies and nig-nogs. Pap Collins used these terms the most,1 but they were occasionally heard in our house too, spoken matter-of-factly and without any overt violence. I will make no woolly defence of that here. I’m afraid Love Thy Neighbour made it alright. I say ‘afraid’ only because it became such a soft target during the revisionist Eighties – along with Benny Hill, Mind Your Language and Jim Davidson – and I’d love to be able to talk it away as a sign of the times like writer and co-creator Vince Powell is often called upon to do now on television, but I can’t. We loved that programme and it ran for four years. We all knew that Eddie was ever the honky loser and Bill the sambo victor in their little turf wars, but that doesn’t make it alright. Thanks to Eddie, we didn’t mind our language.

  Because there were rarely any black kids around to offend, we used the bad words with abandon, even ‘nigger’, although never at anyone. They weren’t used as terms of abuse, merely said without thought or care (which can be just as dangerous of course). We parroted Jim Davidson’s 2 impression of a West Indian, Chalky, but again, not to mock. It was good fun to shake your head vigorously and make that noise with your lips. A boy called John Godfrey, quite a wag, became the centre of attention on the coach home after the French trip with his note-perfect Chalky. Although it pains me to relate (that retroactive guilt again), my diary speaks of ‘doing nigger impressions’. The irony of this thoughtless idiom is that, aged 12, I learned all about the black experience, watching Roots.

  The 12-hour epic mini-series based on Alex Haley’s book was first shown in 1977, but when it was repeated in 1978 I saw every episode and hung on its every development, tracing the bloodline of African slave Kunta Kinte through Kizzy, Chicken George, Tildy and Tom. This was some powerful education. They say half the American population watched the final episode and many whites did so through a kind of national guilt. Well, not me – I watched guiltlessly, with an obsessive interest in the plight of the slaves. And the punchline is …

  Roots, so my diary tells us, was ‘ma favourite programme’. On 24 October, I write, without a hint of irony, ‘Just saw de final episode ob Roots. It wuz de gratest programme of all time.’

  Surely ‘ob all time’?

  This though was my phonetic tribute to the black diaspora, to civil rights, to race relations.3 Kunta Kinte was my new hero, and I would prove it by talking – and writing – just like him, just as I had previously done with the Fonz. I drew good likenesses of the Roots characters from memory, just as I had done with the cast of The Poseidon Adventure, the drivers of Wacky Races and – hey! – the Harlem Globe Trotters before that. I knew more about where Alex Haley’s ancestors had come from than I did about my own. I understood the bigotry and violence and segregation and yet I couldn’t quite square that with my own demeaning use of the word ‘ob’.

  I had a long way to go. We all did. Bloody hell, they only shut the Black & White Minstrel Show down in 1978.

  * * *

  So I wasn’t a racist, just confused. I was a rampant homophobe though. Everybody was. Poof, queer, poofter, woofter, homo, mo, bummer, bum chum, bender … these were all genuinely felt terms of abuse at school, and as stinging an insult a boy could use on another boy (we never considered that there could be female poofs). At upper school, when being a poof started to mean more than being a pansy, the playground folk devil was Noel Collier. He was an older boy, a sixth-former, who had the reputation for being a bum chum. The traditional response to passing him in the corridor was to pretend he had touched your rear end (bum bandit, shirt lifter, turd burglar) and whip him aside while jerking your body away from the clear and present danger. There was a whipping sound that went with this pantomime and it was something like cccchhhw-tcherrrr! Sort of a throat-clearing rising to pursed lips and the sound of steam being let off; a bigoted Ivor the Engine. I have no idea where this came from, but it was the universally recognised fanfare of homophobia at Weston Favell.

  Unlike casual and even accidental racism, the demonisation of poofs was deep-seated in the family (and may well linger, albeit in a less vehement, more suburban way). Nan Mabel and my mum were the worst offenders, talking about someone (always male) being ‘a bit that way’ or ‘a bit funny’ or ‘one of them’. What they were scared of, I don’t know, but a slave to convention will always have many enemies. As far as Mum was concern
ed, of all the crimes I could have committed in my teenage years, turning out gay would have been the most heinous – worse than being on drugs, getting someone pregnant or even having my ear pierced.

  It’s no wonder then that the combination of this blind orthodoxy at home and the constant stereotyping of homosexuals on TV (John Inman, Larry Grayson, Dick Emery) established in my mind the most Neanderthal attitudes to sexual preference. I bet Noel Collier wasn’t gay. He probably glanced the wrong way in the showers once. Stock insults grew from the tiniest acorns. I know he didn’t deserve the mockery of the lower years, that’s for sure, and I really hope he went on to live a gay life, as in happy.

  I did a lot of my learning, good and bad, in front of the television. Roots may have taught me that black people had had a rough time of it, but not all telly was so educational. Mike Yarwood taught me that all politicians were buffoons, which wasn’t such a bad grounding, but at the same time It Ain’t Half Hot Mum taught me that anyone effeminate was a poof and therefore inferior in some way to other men, and Indian people wobbled their heads and said oh deary me. It’s getting on for a worldview, but hardly sophisticated.